Game Design

For those who want to pre-order the game and also try out the Beta, you can do so here. (Note: for Windows.)

This an early Beta release. This is a way to offer people who have pre-ordered a sneak peek into the game, as well as an opportunity for them to offer feedback on features they think would be useful, awesome, and so on, if incorporated into the game.

These screenshots show the attributes system in P4E12. Here’s what the leader attributes look like in P4E12:

The attributes are similar to P4E8. Leadership, Experience, Issue Familiarity, Integrity, Charisma, Stamina, and Debating.

The difference comes with the campaign attributes:

There is Command Strength, Strategic Strength, Ads Strength, Spin Strength, and so on. Players start off with different levels, and the player can then increase the campaign strength in a particular area, allocating Command Points (CPs) and money to do so. In the above, Romney is increasing his Ads Strength from 3 to 4, allocating 3 CPs a turn.

Higher Command Strength = more CPs and the ability to create higher regional Organizational Strengths (something else that’s new in P4E12), higher Strategic Strength helps with Targeting states (another new thing in P4E12), Ads Strength helps with creating more powerful ads more quickly, and so on.

Also noticeable on the screen is the Corruption attribute. While Integrity has to do with the candidate’s personal and own campaign integrity, Corruption has to do with the surrounding political context for the leader (such as their administration). Higher corruption means it is easier to research scandals on that player.

President Forever 2012, the sequel to President Forever 2008 + Primaries, is nearing initial Beta release.

In the lead up to that, we’ll be releasing some screenshots focusing on some new and different features from President Forever 2008 + Primaries.

Here’s how things look at the start of the general election in P4E12 on Sep. 7th, playing as Mitt Romney:

One difference that’s obvious is that projected Electoral College support for the two parties is arranged left-to-right (Dems on left, Reps on right), and is broken down into levels of support. You can see, in this particular case, that although the Dems have more Electoral Votes (E.V.s) than Reps (296 to 209, with 33 too close to call), their support is soft, with 129 of those in the weakest level of support, while only 28 Rep E.V.s are in the corresponding category.

One new feature is Electoral Vote Swing Info:

Here, you can see which states the respective parties are projected to pick up relative to the previous election, and which ones are too close to call that might change hands (with the party that is technically leading in brackets). This feature also includes the swing in (normalized) E.V.s (not displayed in the above screenshot). So, for the above screenshot, Reps are +29 projected E.V.s from the previous election, and Dems are -62 E.V.s., and this is shown in the same box as the projected swing states. The plus-minus numbers are ‘normalized’, in that state-by-state Electoral Vote distribution may have changed, and so the numbers are normalized to the current election’s state-by-state E.V.s.